It's atypical at most schools around the country for regents to make football news, but in tradition-steeped Aggieland it's as quintessential as the 12th Man and Reveille.

It wasn't the present that doomed Kevin Sumlin at Texas A&M, it was the past

In 1982 three A&M regents, without the knowledge of school President Frank Vandiver and then-coach Tom Wilson, courted Michigan's Bo Schembechler. When ol' Bo decided to remain a Michigan man, A&M signed Jackie Sherrill to a then-jaw-dropping five-year rolling contract worth $240,000 annually.

"Regents don't hire football coaches," says Sherrill, now 73. "But they do, if that makes sense."

Some powers, like hiring presidents for the A&M system's 11 schools, making budget decisions and setting policy, are written. Others are implied and therefore open to individual interpretation. Allow Sherrill to explain why.

"Regents are powerful at any institution, but especially in the state of Texas," he says. "They're more powerful here because they are put in that position by the governor."

Regents at Texas A&M, Texas and the state's other public university systems are appointed by the governor, typically to staggered six-year terms so that a few new regents are cycled in every two to three years. Sometimes they are reappointed to additional terms.

Houston attorney and former Aggies Corps of Cadets battalion commander Buzbee, 49, was appointed to A&M's board by Rick Perry in 2013. A year later, he became Perry's lead counsel and successfully fought for dismissal of an abuse-of-power indictment.

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Buzbee's courtroom ferocity is legendary. After all, he served as a Marine captain in the Persian Gulf and Somalian conflicts. Most college football fans, though, had never heard of him until the night of Sept. 3, when he fired salvos at Sumlin moments after the Aggies blew a 34-point lead in a 45-44 loss at UCLA.

Buzbee railed about Sumlin's "arrogance" and "mishandling of multiple player controversies," opined that Sumlin coaches poorly in big games and declared, "In my view, he should go now. We owe it to our school and our players."

Undaunted by three ensuing days of criticism from national media, ex-college coaches Tommy Tuberville and Gene Chizik and former Aggies coach and regent Gene Stallings, Buzbee pointed out to the Houston Chronicle that he has donated $7 million to A&M, adding, "What I care about is our school; and I'll speak however I see fit."

Since the UCLA loss, A&M has defeated Nicholls State and Louisiana-Lafayette, overcoming lackluster first halves in each game. Editor's note: Sumlin ended the regular season 7-5 before being fired.

Before the season, sixth-year coach Sumlin had publicly been put on notice by athletic director Scott Woodward -- "Coach knows he has to win. And he has to win this year" -- but Buzbee's rant effectively poisoned the water for the rest of the season.

"Whether or not Sumlin is the right guy or the wrong guy, I don't get involved in that, but I think the timing was awfully poor for the coach," Stallings, 82, says. "That puts extreme pressure on him. And then losing a game he obviously should have won?

"But, anyway, he lost it and I can understand people being vocal about it. It's just that I think it would be better suited if they kept their opinion to themselves until it's time to make a decision."

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Perhaps no one knows more than Stallings about how intoxicating it can be, this unique concoction of football, Aggie spirit, power and, sometimes, politics.

Stallings was one of the "Junction Boys" survivors of Bryant's summer of '54 training camp and a standout on the 9-0-1 '56 team that won A&M's first Southwest Conference title since 1941 -- though the Aggies were ineligible to play in the Cotton Bowl because of recruiting violations.

When Bryant left A&M for his alma mater, Alabama, after the 1957 season, Stallings joined him as an assistant. Stallings was Texas A&M's head coach from 1965 to 1971, guiding the Aggies to their only Cotton Bowl appearance (1968) between the 1941 and 1985 seasons.

Stallings also was a Board of Regents member, appointed by fellow Aggie Perry, from 2005 to 2011. That alone speaks to how intrinsic football is to A&M's culture and power structure. Current regents Phil Adams and Cliff Thomas played under Stallings at A&M.

Adams is serving his third six-year term, Thomas his second. From 2013 to 2015, Adams was regents chairman and Thomas was vice chairman. Thomas then became chairman from 2015 to 2017. So, yes, the topic of football has been known to come up in board meetings.

"My personal opinion is I feel like the Board of Regents' main responsibility is to hire the presidents of the 11 universities within our system," Stallings says. "And then we make policy.

"My personal opinion is the athletic director hires the coach. Now, I'm not so naïve to think that people don't get involved in football coaches. People enjoy football at Texas A&M. The regents want to get involved in hiring a coach, and that's their prerogative. It's just that I don't feel like that's the best way to do it."

Of course, A&M isn't the only Texas school with governor-appointed leadership, nor the only place where regents have at times lorded over the football program.

When Darrell Royal retired as Texas' football coach in 1976, he, as athletic director, favored elevating longtime Longhorns assistant Mike Campbell to head coach. Controversially, the job instead went to Fred Akers, a move orchestrated by former regent Frank Erwin and then-chairman Allan Shivers, Texas' governor from 1949 to 1957.

As recently as 2012, after Mack Brown's next-to-last season at Texas, regents Wallace Hall and Steve Hicks and former regent Tom Hicks held a conference call with Nick Saban's agent, Jimmy Sexton, to gauge Saban's potential interest in coming to Texas.

Then-Texas President Bill Powers told The News in 2013 that he was unaware of the Saban efforts. Prominent alumnus Mike Myers of Dallas that year told The News: "I think we have a big problem in terms of regents acting like they are individual people instead of a member of a group."

Jack Finney, Aggies Class of '38, probably wasn't the first A&M regent to court a coach, but he seemingly set the standard for football involvement.

After founding Finney's Holsum Bread Co. in Greenville and becoming a successful land developer, he became, at age 36 in 1953, A&M's youngest regent. In 2002, Finney recalled to The News that when Shivers appointed him, it was with the charge to "do something about the football program."

Under coaches Harry Stiteler and Raymond George, the Aggies from 1948 to 1953 had gone 20-35-6. Unimpressed with the athletic council's search for a new coach, A&M regents chairman W.T. Doherty created an "advisory" committee consisting of himself and fellow regents Finney and Al Cudlipp to "assist" in the search.

Bagging the Bear made Finney an Aggies hero for life, as prominently noted in obituaries when he died in 2010 at age 93. Finney, though, also was a central figure in perhaps the most bungled coaching search in Texas if not all of college history.

When Bryant left for Alabama, A&M's athletic council began the replacement search, but so, independently, did the regents' advisory committee, now chaired by Finney.

The resulting chaos included Michigan State's Duffy Daugherty and retired Notre Dame legend Frank Leahy turning down the job; Navy's Eddie Erdelatz and Iowa State's Jim Myers both believing they had been offered the position and both withdrawing in disgust; and A&M crawling back to Myers to beg him to take the job.

Public embarrassment included new governor Price Daniel demanding an explanation, newspaper sports editors around the state blasting A&M's regents, and chairman Doherty hastily dissolving his coaching search advisory committee.

"It looks like the shoe's on the other foot now," Finney angrily told The News that night. "I have in my possession a copy of a letter from G. Rollie White, then chairman of the board, written to Mr. Doherty while we were hunting a football coach that ended with the hiring of Bear Bryant, requesting that his committee be dissolved. Mr. Doherty then was chairman of the committee."

Another member of the dissolved committee, regent L.H. Ridout Jr. of Dallas, seemed to best sum up the debacle: "Aggies have never been known for their unanimity of opinion. I think patience is a virtue that has been overlooked in some areas."

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Aggie leadership's promises of reform weren't long kept. It didn't help that Myers and successor Henry Foldberg went 18-47-5 from 1958 to 1964, while late-'50s rival hires Royal and Frank Broyles began long, successful reigns at Texas and Arkansas.

Stallings says that when he was hired in 1965, it was regents who flew him in for the interview. He doesn't recall the school's president, Gen. James Earl Rudder, being part of the hiring process.

Considering his school's history with regents and coaches, perhaps President Vandiver should not have been surprised in January 1982 to learn that regents chair Bum Bright, Dallas regent William McKenzie and Houston regent John Blocker had secretly formed a search committee -- consisting of themselves -- to find a new athletic director and football coach.

Sherrill got both jobs.

"I want preeminence in every field for Texas A&M," declared Bright, who purchased the Cowboys two years later but sold them to Jerry Jones in 1989.

"We look as though we put the cart before the horse, that we have decided to become a great football power and thus we bring down some ridicule upon ourselves," Vandiver lamented to The Washington Post in 1982. "It is a setback to the academic reputation of the university that saddens me."

Sherrill recalls that, though he was wooed by the three regents, the decision to hire him was a collective one by all nine regents. Sherrill says he also refused to formally accept the job until he could sit down with Vandiver, a meeting that lasted two hours.

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"The chancellor is there to run the system," Sherrill says. "The president is there to run the university. The athletic director is there to run the athletic department. The coach is there to coach the team.

"The pecking order certainly goes up to the board, but that's not any different than the pecking order of any company. ... All employees don't necessarily like the decisions employers make, but that's not our choice."

While acknowledging regents' power, both written and implied, Sherrill says was disappointed in Buzbee's public criticisms of Sumlin.

"Out of frustration, he did something that a lot of people do with social media," Sherrill says. "And unfortunately social media is what it is. It's a social contact that puts emotions out there where emotions shouldn't be.

"You don't have to tell Kevin Sumlin how to coach. He can coach."

Unlike past secrecies in Aggieland, Sumlin now knows that at least one A&M regent has potential to be this generation's Jack Finney, for better or worse.